Iran Welcomes Deals between Yemeni Warring Parties

TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi said the country welcomes the agreements and understandings reached between the Yemeni warring sides during the UN-brokered peace talks in Sweden.

In a statement late on Thursday, Qassemi described the confidence-building measures and preliminary agreements to continue the negotiations as positive and promising.

He further called the ceasefire agreement reached on the Yemeni port city of Hudaydah very important and praised the Yemeni parties for understanding the catastrophic situation which the impoverished country is going through.

The spokesman also expressed the hope that the port city of Hudaydah and other Yemeni ports and airports, including Sana’a airport, would be prepared to receive humanitarian aid as soon as possible.

Earlier, the spokesman for Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement Mohammad Abdulsalam, who headed a delegation in the UN-brokered peace talks in Sweden, said a ceasefire was reached in the last day of the talks for the western port city of al-Hudaydah.

Abdulsalam said the warring parties agreed on Thursday to a ceasefire for the flashpoint city of Hudaydah and its surrounding governorate, the Arabic-language Al Mayadeen TV reported.

“We gave many concessions on Hudaydah to save the Yemeni people, and we retreated from our positions,” the senior Yemeni official noted.

The Yemeni peace talks opened in the Swedish capital of Stockholm on December 7 on an upbeat note, with the warring sides agreeing to a broad prisoner swap, boosting hopes that the talks would not deteriorate into further violence as in the past.

Some 8.4 million Yemenis are facing starvation as a result of the Saudi-led aggression, although the United Nations has warned that will probably rise to 14 million.

Since March 2015, Saudi Arabia and some of its Arab allies have been carrying out deadly airstrikes against the Houthi Ansarullah movement in an attempt to restore power to fugitive former president Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, a close ally of Riyadh.

The Yemeni Ministry of Human Rights announced in a statement on March 25 that the war had left 600,000 civilians dead and injured until then. The war and the accompanying blockade have also caused famine across Yemen.